• Question: What is it about age that makes people more likely to get diseases ect??

    Asked by natalierogers to Jen, Jill, Mel, Phil, Stef on 16 Mar 2013.
    • Photo: Stefan Piatek

      Stefan Piatek answered on 16 Mar 2013:

      A really good question, I once had to do a review on the effects of ageing on a certain type of your body’s fighter cell.

      If you imagine that your cells start off with a length of string, and every time they divide, a little bit of the string gets snipped off the end. Once they have no sting, they can’t divide or grow anymore! Some of our cells can add on to the string but some of our fighter cells can’t. So over time we slowly loose our fighter cells because they run out of string, which means that we are more prone to infection.

      Hope that makes sense!

    • Photo: Jennifer Paxton

      Jennifer Paxton answered on 19 Mar 2013:

      Couldn’t explain it better than Stefan! Basically there becomes a certain amount of times the fighter cells can divide and eventually it becomes easier for infections to take control.

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